Make Your Life Yoga
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
Around the same time of which I was speaking in my previous post, three yoga teachers in their sixties gave me the exact same advice. Each in their own way— one at lunch, one over tea, and another in an email—told me that the secret to longevity as a practitioner and a teacher was: “Don’t make yoga, or the business of yoga, your whole life.”
I remember thinking, “But isn’t that what all this is about—immersing yourself in the teachings, living them in all aspects of your life, making yoga a lifestyle?”
These elders were long-time practitioners and renowned teachers, each from different systems, all with great proficiency and notoriety. Each teacher enjoyed the respect of their elders, their peers, and their students, which is no small accomplishment in the world of modern yoga. They clearly had experience and a seasoned perspective from which I could benefit. However, their advice was a bit jarring to my “all yoga all the time,” cult-indoctrinated background.
I was exploring the same theme in therapy, so I recognized the synchronicity at play. And, I was not new to the process of personal growth, so I recognized that I was going to need to live with this advice a while before knowing exactly how to put the advice into action. Like Rilke instructs the young poet in the quote at the top of this entry, I had to live with the question and live into my own answers. In this case, the question was pretty simple, “What the hell does it mean to not make yoga my life?”
At some point, I realized that for me, there was a distinction between making yoga my life and making life my yoga. Making yoga my life had me at the mercy of public opinion, overly identified with industry trends, and overly concerned, critical and/or jealous of other people’s expressions as practitioners and teachers. Making yoga my life meant I didn’t ride a bike because it made my thighs tight and my backbends feel shitty. Making yoga my life meant that I didn’t have friends who didn’t practice yoga, didn’t include my Christian upbringing in my life of spirituality, didn’t go on non-yoga vacations, and spent a lot of time inside in the studio rather than outside in nature. Writing it all out makes me realize that making yoga my life involved a lot of “I didn’t.”
Of course, there were positive things also. I learned a lot about myself, practice, teaching and community. I meditated, read inspiring scriptures, had deep conversations, made amazing friends around the world, and lived inside a very large story of spiritual growth, discipleship, and possibility. As time went on, I began to see that these inner orientations toward ultimacy, devotion, and what I call Remembrance, could be brought into my ordinary life in meaningful ways outside of formal settings likes ashrams, yoga studios, and seminars. I learned that these experiences could inform activities beyond asana, mantra, and meditation such as dinner parties, mountain biking, hiking, snowboarding, caring for my mom, and dog training. Instead of yoga becoming my whole life, my whole life could become my yoga.
I am not saying that I live in some inner state of cosmic unity in the midst of life’s tedious chores and upsetting circumstances. I am simply saying that at some point, the division I had set up between what was yoga and what wasn’t, or what was spiritual and what wasn’t, got blurrier. As the distinctions blurred, a few rather lovely paradoxes emerged. By spending regular time in practices like asana, mantra, and meditation, the mundane surface of my life felt more enjoyable for what it was in its glorious simplicity. My outer and the inner lives became both more distinct and more the same, each informing the other instead of standing in opposition. Love of God began to feel more like Love itself. By spending time making a life beyond yoga, I eventually walked back into my life as yoga.
I can’t count the times over the years that my students have told me that they love yoga and just want to do yoga all the time. I remember the feeling well. I admit I occasionally feel envious of the stage of delight in the journey, love for the practice, and for the times when I willingly, wholeheartedly, immersed myself in formal study and practice with hope and zeal. But I don’t think anyone truly means that they want to spend their lives in a yoga studio making shapes with their body or that life on a meditation cushion is how we are intended to spend our days.
What I think these students are are saying— at least what I know I want — is for the feeling of freedom, of expansion, of purpose, of connection I find in practice to permeate my life, to be with me as much as possible, to become a thread I can pull through the many moments of my day and the varied seasons of my life in the same way that the thread of the breath pulls me through a strong vinyasa or a quiet session of pranayama. Yep, I think what I want is my life to be yoga.
This is the last entry in my Advice to New Teachers Series. I began this series in July 2021, reflecting on some advice my teacher gave me when I started teaching and brainstorming a list of advice I have for new teachers, in addition to the advice he gave me. Here I am in November 2021, having finally made my way through that initial list. Thanks for going the distance if you made it this far. If you are just now joining me on the blog, you can see the whole series here:
Next Up: The Strength Sutras (Or Letters to a Young Yogi) Stay Tuned.
Each weekend will have asana classes, discussions, lecture and experiential exercises to help participants take an inner journey and learn practical tools for creating and facilitating their own offerings. The program is all online to minimize disruption to daily life and travel expenses as well as to maximize health and safety during these difficult times. Christina will incorporate breaks throughout the day to mitigate zoom fatigue and create a multi-faceted approach to your engagement with the information.
